The Great Techie Toast Debate in Seussian Rhyme

A bedtime tale of breakfast, gentrification, and San Francisco values.

The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss's masterpiece about mutually assured destruction, might provide us a window into the latest San Francisco kerfuffle. It's not the Google bus or the Twitter tax break that has locals up in arms this time, but the rising cost of artisanal toast. Here, our analysis of the great toast debate of 2013 in rhyming couplets, with apologies to the Seussian classic:

The Toast Battle Book

On the 21st of August, writer Jolie O’DellOn Venturebeat took us all out to The Mill
For a while she stood silent, then finally spoke
With a very sad shake of head, and I quote
“This City is so filled up with techies,” she said
“Who are crazy enough to pay four dollars for bread.”
The writer went on, “Of the horrors, this is the most”
“Those bourgeoisie techies pay four dollars for toast!
But we proles, as you know, when we breakfast or sup
bake our very own bread, so the cost won’t go up."
O’Dell was now huffy.
“Every techie must be stopped. They pay 2 bucks for coffee!”

And on that very day, the news was so slow
That progressive activists decided to show
That it wasn’t just toast: why, the toast was not all.
For the prices were up for the bedroom and hall!
So here’s a petition from the Courage Campaign
With figures and stats, unafraid to name names.
They had solved all the ills of the LGBT
And now had a new target—his name was Ed Lee.
This is no fault of the techies, they said,
It’s not even a conversation about bread.
We are angry at the mustachioed one.
Why, he could fix it. He could get things done.

With his tax breaks for Twitter, his America’s Cup
Lee butters the toast that the techies disrupt
Does he care—cried progressives—that we stand to starve?
He probably captains that new Google barge.
Lee didn’t protest, he had naught to say to them
Does he hope to serve Toast in the Warriors new stadium?
But wait, said SFist, we’re on the same team
The Toasters and Techies aren’t quite the same thing.
Starbucks is worse: Josey Baker is local.
The tax on your toast doesn’t go to some yokel
The Bread’s just a substitute for some larger feud
It’s a delicious, maligned, and gluten-rich food.

So is tony tech toast really at fault?
For this should we force economics to halt?
Of course what we need is a city affordable
But are luxury goods and their buyers deplorable?
We know of some places where the toast is real cheap
They’re Flint, they’re Detroit, hell, they’re Walnut Creek.
But we’re San Franciscans, for better or worse,
And tech’s tax money lines our city purse
So with some leftover dough from Biz Stone and Ron Conway
Let’s have ourselves a bread and jam giveaway
And for his reelection campaign, we’ll hear the mayor boast
“If they haven’t got cake, then let them eat Toast”